I make things

Tag: anime studio

I am really behind the deadline. I apologise but I had some live isues and I just couldn’t put the things together. Fortunately, it’s okay now and I hope it will never happen again…

I am vaguely happy with this project.

I am glad it is done, I am happy with the music, I think it fits well, it’s cheerful. I like the look of my characters. I am happy with the colourful transitions between shots I made. I really like the transformation of the ill bunny into the healthy bunny, I followed a tutorial to make some random particles floating in the space and from that, I managed to create those nice little sparkles (I am pretty impressed with myself), but the rest…

Genuine movement and how entertaining it is: I think its boring, the bear is just stood there talking for way too long, its not very interesting.

Bun the bunny spitting out the hammer: its happening too fast, I should have moved the camera in on it or find a different way to solve it.

Bunny’s turn on the MRI scanner, it doesn’t look very good and it looks unrealistic, even robotic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t spend any more time on it.

Sound synchronisation. I really don’t know why the sound is out. It is really getting on my nerves. I spent alot of time trying to make it perfect. I just looked at it again and its way too early. It might be the fact that when I was putting all the things together in Adobe Premiere, it glitched really badly and I couldn’t really see anything properly… I probably should have done it using a university computer.

The voice doesn’t fit at all, I am aware of that. I had a different better one but it had many mistakes, we tried to rerecord bad parts but it didn’t work so I had to use something…

The impression in total

I think the animation is not bad at all, especially if you look at some things that are posted on Youtube….

My mum showed it to her young students (she is a piano teacher) and the response was pretty good. But they werent going to actually have an MRI scan, so I can’t really say if it worked. The kids liked the healthy bunny, especially.

Working in After Effects. I cant say that I enjoyed it… In a way, it’s easy but I really dont think it’s good software to use for animation. After using Anime Studio Pro, I felt a bit restricted in what I could do. And it also kept crashing on me…

After Effects is the panda…

I am planning to make an animation on the side using After Effects just so I could feel more comfortable with the software because I do realise that it is widely used.

Little bits and pieces

Dr Bear skeleton, I wanted to make a jar of honey inside his belly but then I realised that he doesnt really have much to do with Winnie the pooh….

Bun the Bunny’s x ray/mri photo

I am really happy with it. It makes me think of day of the dead

Bun the Bunny spitting out the hammer

Bun the Bunny with headphones

Creepy eye glitch

A horrible crash which happened to me… I had to manually replace every single part of the body of each character…. I have no idea what happened or why.

Some sketches and other things I forgot to post earlier

Mouth shapes which I made before I started creating Dr Bear’s mouth shapes

first sketches and tries

the “script”…

things to draw for the animationCute bear again… because it’s cute…

Actual storyboard…. The first one has been eaten by Pinat [my rabbit]… he also tried to eat other things (see above)

I recorded dialogue and some sounds on my own but the rest is from https://www.freesound.org/

After unfair and really long fight with after effects I had to start making my animation again in a different program (Anime studio pro), half way through the time I got given because we couldn’t figure out how to make some things work and a deadline is a deadline. In the end, its not like I don’t know how to use After Effects, there simply was no time for getting stuck…..

But the colours come from this one, my favourite… Russian Winnie the Pooh (personally, I think he is much funnier)

The rest of the inspirations

Another bear which I think of in regards to animation is Koda from My Brother Bear – cute lovable, nice with good colours.

A standard teddy bear – I dont know any kid that would not want to have one

and a doctor bear, I know it is popular in some countries to use teddy bears in the doctors outfit to help children go through medical treatment.

Bun the Bunny

Ill bunny

Healthy cute bunny

The main inspiration for this character was none other than my bun, Pinat.

His personality is really bipolar. Usually, he is a nice, cute little bunny and all the stuff and fluff, but from time to time he tries to conquer the wold with his razor-sharp teeth….

When he is in his berserk mode, he makes loads of weird growling noises and he is pretty shaky.

Other inspirations

Idea of the sharp contours for the angry bun came from here

this one is just cute and I like the colours

…basically, a ball with ears! This is what I was looking for!

In the end I decided not to give my bun any limbs, I find him much prettier without them.

Here is proof that bunnies want to be a ball

Radiographer

Radiographer’s shape was pretty easy to create, I just slightly transformed Dr Bear’s body. In the beginning I wanted it to be more like Akita Inu

but when I made the body ginger I realized it looks more like a fox

I didn’t want the radiographer to be a fox because even though I love them, most of the childrens stories are about foxes that are cheeky. I thought that it has to be a dog because people trust them (after all they call dogs, mans best friend). I wanted to use Akita Inu, just because I like them but if I couldn’t use that, I wondered about other trusted breeds. I thought of two, Golden Retriever and Labrador. Quite lucky as they look so similar. So this is where the main colour came from. I decided to add darker spots because I had a feeling that just one beige colour wouldn’t look very good, also the tail would blend in with the body.

Backgrounds

Doctor’s room

MRI scanner room

MRI scanner top + draw

The inspiration for Dr Bear’s room came from my idea of how a typical doctor’s cabinet would look like. It needs dark, wooden furniture and dyplomas on the wall. I actually had a version with pictures on the wall but it looked too messy so I decided to get rid of them.

The colours came from my family doctor’s office in Poland. I always thought that it looks extremely friendly as for the fact that it was a DOCTOR’S cabinet….

I decided on a floral pattern on the walls because all of the characters in my animation are animals, and most of it is happenning in this room. I wanted it to be friendly and I wanted to make the illusion that it’s completely normal to have animal doctors and staff(stuff). The red lines on the floor are supposed to simulate flower roots but actually they really make me think of the top coat on a cactus ice cream…. it is one of my favourite things….

MRI scanner

I wanted it to be simple, clear and clean looking. To intensify the feeling of importancy of the place and all the rules you need to follow in there.

The Radiographer’s room

In the beginning I had the idea to make Dr Bear speak from the radiographer’s room but I didn’t like how the computers would look, and placing all three characters in one small room didn’t seem like a good idea because of the size of the room, so I just decided to leave the idea.

Research I

The goal of this project is to make an animation that will get to 6-8 year old children. It required deeper research because the audience is specified. Because of this, I decided to look at what is appropriate for a kid of this age. Most of the information I got, in regards to age-specific materials, I found here. You can find some of the intformation here.

d) I would make the fish swim smoothly and look more flexible but I think that at the moment, it has it’s charms.

e)If I had more than 30 seconds, I would give the audience more time to have a look at what is on the other side of the waterpond

f) I would add seaweed and other stuff to the water pond

g) I would add some stars to the night sky and make the night last longer

h) I would give the piranhas eyes (I had forgotten about them!)

i) If I had more than 30 seconds, I would like muggy to squirt the water out from his mouth like a fountain, also I’d make the fish bite him and flap around on the ground afterwards.

j) Next time I’ll try to record my own sounds.

Other than this, I wouldnt change anything. Im happy with the sounds, happy with the character movement and the look of the animtion.

I have learned that if you want to make a 30 second animation, it should be really simple. And that using varied programs can really open up possibilities. Using them in conjunction with eachother, you can make something really cool.

I think I’m getting better with time, organisation and writing the blog.

It is going slowly. I was wondering what to do about ending the story. The project task says that the character has to overcome the obstacle and I wanted to do that… but it seems like it’s funnier when he fails! Well, Andy says that he can fail. So he does.

After the story was 100% finished and I had made all the pieces of the background move, I met with big trouble. TVPaint wasnt good for what I wanted to do with my character. I tried and it just wasn’t possible to make it move the correct way and there was no time to waste. In the and I had to use different software for Muggy (Anime Studio Pro). I had to learn how to do everything very fast. Some things were much more difficult than others but I now feel like I know more about Anime studio than TVPaint at the moment.

Here is a little sample of the day and night shift

List for the sounds

To be honest, I didnt have any trouble with knowing how to show something to the audience for them to understand what was going on. I do, however, wish that I was given more time than 30 seconds… I had many problems with HOW to make something with the software. Well it really was a long, hard fight.

Using sequential digital drawing, create a 30 second animation that tells a story using the three act structure of a character overcoming an obstacle in pursuit of an objective.

Research, inspirations and influence

My idea was born really quickly. We had 10 minutes to plan, so after a few sketches of characters & backgrounds and preparing the story, I decided to use my initial idea and run with it.

The main character’s name is Muggy

Athough he is the total opposite of being ‘muggy’, what he tries to do often goes wrong. Also, I wanted the name to have something to do with one of the POKEMON, Muk.

My other inspirations for the character designs were:

The ghosts from Pacman

The Groke from The Moomins

Blooregard Q. Kazoo from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends

No Face God from Spirited Away

As you can see they all have similar shapes, big mouths and a few of them definitely like to eat…

When I was designing the piranhas I was thinking about the game Rayman Origins which I played some time ago

I had this weird feeling that piranhas should be coloured toxic green and pink. I’m unsure where the idea came from, but there must be a reason for it somewhere…

The background

I was inspired (and I think I always will be inspired) by Adrien Merigeau who was the main backgroud guy in “Song of the sea” (one of my favourites 4ever <3<3<3) and “The Secret of Kells” films, directed by Toom Moore who also has a big influence on my work.

I really love the result they came up with designing stones, trees and all the nature. It’s so simple but wonderful. I wish I had come up with it.

The fact that I was using the same program as them has helped a lot. TVPaint is fantastic software if you know what are you doing.

The Story

My idea is easy. Muggy walks around the forest, then he sees a pink flower which smells tasty so he eats it. As he walks across the field, he eats another two flowers and then comes across an obstacle in the form of a regular sized water pond filled with hungry piranhas. He takes a fishing rod out of his mouth (there is the story behind this aswell. Muggy can eat things, but he can also store them if he wants to. Nobody really knows how or where but he can. It’s a little bit like Terry Pratchett’s Luggage from the Disc World Series. (There’s another inspiration that I wasn’t even aware of.))

He tries to use the rod to fish but the Piranhas arent stupid so his idea doesn’t work. Day and night passes and he’s still fishing. He puts the fishing rod back into his mouth and takes out a big straw and sticks it into the water and starts drinking it. He drinks the whole water pond… including the fish. He becomes circular because of the water, falls into the empty pond and gets stuck in it.

The Sounds

Im planning to have a nature track in the background, something with birds & trees and maybe lake waves. Also, some sounds for eating, water splashing and all the other sounds that I can’t think of right now but I know I will need them hahaha

I already have a background. It didn’t take long really, just a couple of hours but it’s alright I suppose.